It’s funny how your life can tend to be defined as the accretion of decisions made over months and years.  I say “tend to” because I am thoughtfully considering whether or not this is actually the case, or whether it is just habit and expectation and norms that make us the sum of our past.

A friend writes on Twitter:

if you won the lottery, how would you spend $2 million vs. $10 million.

Interesting thought exercise, because it tells you what your true magnetic north might be.  Would you do more of the same – whatever it is you’re doing now?  Would you make radical changes?  Why?  If money defines freedom, what would you use that freedom for?

A famous quote:

You can’t change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

What direction would you pick?  Would you head to the same place(s) you were heading for yesterday, last month, last year?

A new acquaintance asks me “What is your passion in life?” To which I respond:

Multiple things: innovation, creativity, true love, the pursuits of the intellect, my kids, Liverpool Football Club, positive thinking.

I could add a handful of things to that list if pressed, but another way to look at it is that life represents a series of choices, a series of decisions, a list of opportunity costs.  You can’t be passionate about everything – at some level you choose, every day, by how you spend you time, who and what you think about, what you produce, what you consume, what you share, what you hold back, and by the narrative you carry around in your head about how the world works.

I guess my thesis – if I get to choose – is that we have a lot more freedom to set our direction that one might originally suppose.  As they say about money, everything is fungible.

Is there a missing ingredient?  I would say “thought”.   Thinking.  Reflection.  Don’t assume that you’re destined, fated, preordained, or stuck if some little part of your brain is dissatisfied.  Think about what you can do TODAY to change your direction.   Sample thought exercise: think of one person that would give you the most uplifting, motivational, aligned, engaged, inspiring conversation that will lead to positive change in your life.  E-mail that person and offer to buy them a cup of coffee.

Me at Victrola Coffee, doing a little coding and blogging and reading and such.  February 7th, 2010.

Let me get this out of the way first: Jeff Bridges absolutely deserves his Oscar nomination for his performance in Crazy Heart.  He’s always been a favorite of mine, ever since his enigmatic, incomprehensible performance in 1993’s Fearless, and he is superb in this film.  He plays Bad Blake, a broken-down alcoholic, a former country superstar gone to seed, and he lives the role as if he were born to play it.  He’s a stumbling drunk, a songwriting genius, a charming, nice guy who is also totally self-centered, a rogue and a walking dead man.  It’s a great acting performance.

That’s the good: now the bad.  The movie is intense, often painfully so, and if you have a history of alcoholism in your family, some of the scenes are going to make you uncomfortable.  At least they did me, but that may be partially the result of natural sensitivities in addition to my own family history.   Some parts of the movie were HARD.

A surprising delight was Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom who falls into Bad Blake’s universe, and, even after a lifetime of bad decisions, continues to make them, to near-catastrophic effect.  I won’t give up the plot line, but Jeanie says at one point that having a relationship with an alcoholic is “like living with a rattlesnake”, and her family feels the bite.  She’s a surprisingly beautiful actress and exudes a sensuality that I’d missed in the other roles I’ve seen her in.  Her characterization runs the wire – from frank and strong to weak and vulnerable, angry and tender and needy and distant.  She deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination and I hope she wins it (although Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air was spectacular also).

I’m not 100% convinced yet that the ending is the one I would have hoped for.  Again, without giving too much away, I feel it could have been more dramatic and of a piece with the rest of the story.  The movie is based on the book by Thomas Cobb, so I assume it follows more or less faithfully the plot line of the novel, but still…

Worth seeing?  Absolutely.  The acting performances are amazing.  I’m surprised that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, in a year that has Inglorious Basterds, Up, and A Serious Man among the Best Picture nominees – all of which I panned in various ways.

Ever known the super-smart guy (typically, they’re always guys) who was just an absolute a**hole and couldn’t work well with others?  A recent GigaOM post, The Five Myths That Can Kill A Startup, refers to Reed Hastings’ term “brilliant jerks” to describe these people.  According to authors Michael Fisher and Marty Abbott:

Intelligence is important, but only insofar as it helps with performance and execution. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in “Outliers,” while some minimum level of intelligence might be necessary for superior performance, in many jobs it’s not in and of itself enough to ensure it. You need people willing and able to work as part of a team, and sometimes superior individual contributors can negatively affect team performance by creating affective or role-based conflict (for more on those, see Myth #3 below). As Reed Hastings puts it, you should eliminate all brilliant jerks from your team.

Which of course led me to Reed Hastings’ presentation on SlideShare that Om references.  I love it, and consider it a must-read for managers and entrepreneurs.  I like this statement in particular:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.

You ever work at a place and wonder how clueless management could possibly be?  (Scott Adams made a fortune off of this omnipresent phenomenon).  Look around: what are your company’s values?  They’re demonstrated by who gets rewarded, who doesn’t get rewarded, who gets hired, fired, reprimanded, how certain people are treated relative to others, relative pay, etc. etc.  The company’s support or non-support of certain people send an absolutely clear message about what’s important.  Printed mission statements and values declarations can’t hide it.

Now, having looked closely at that, do you still feel like your personal values are aligned with your company’s actual values?

If not, what do you do?

I’m going to start looking closely at widget technology.  Not widget as in “doodad: something unspecified whose name is either forgotten or not known”, but widget as in “a live update on a website, webpage, or desktop.”  I have been thinking for some time about using widgets as part of a distribution strategy for Crowdify, and a recent phone call convinced me to jump on the ball and get the tech done.

So, what’s a widget, really?  It’s something that:

a) publishers (using that term VERY broadly) can get;

b) runs on a webpage;

c) dynamically pulls content at render-time from a source location;

d) (optionally) uses JavaScript to do snazzy UI effects;

e) (optionally) allows website visitors to interact with them

The user views the widget contents, interacts with the widget by clicking or what-have-you, and hopefully does whatever the widget provider wanted them to do in the first place.  For Crowdify, that will mean clicking on terms and submitting them.

You can think of banner ads as a widget, using definitions (a) through (c), above.  I’m more interested in examples of fully-interactive widgets, since that’s what I’ll need for Crowdify.

So what sorts of architectures can one use for widgets?  (I’m talking the display of the widget on the publisher’s site, not the getting of the widget code in the first place).

• Well, <IFRAME>s are deprecated all to hell, and for good reason.  Next.
• I see a lot of <script> tags that pull HTML content back from a dynamic source, i.e. PHP or ASPX code.  This is the “server proxy” approach.
• I also see lots of widgets that use a <script> tag that pulls from a remote .js script.  Similar deal as the above, but makes heavier use of JavaScript to render results.  This is the “script tag” approach.
• You can make Flash widgets that load from a remote host.
• I’m sure, without checking, that I could do a Silverlight widget.
• What is this JSONP business?  It’s a way to do Ajax calls without getting drilled by XSS restrictions.  I’m not sure what advantages this has over the server proxy approach, other than the “cool factor”.  Maybe performance?  Agility/more flexibility for API callers?  I need to look into this a bit more.

Enough for now.  More widget research later.

From an article about a Katie Couric photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar:

Couric calls herself a joyful person. "I mean, hello? Yes. I am. I am! And unashamed that I’m not cynical or dark or ironic."

I’ve never been the world’s biggest Couric fan, but her Sarah Palin interview from late 2008 cracked the ice, and now I find she’s an irrepressibly joyful person and I’m all agog and giggly and aw-shucks and toe-twistingly blushing over The Perky One.

I still won’t watch CBS Evening News, or any other network news show for that matter, because I loathe lowest-common-denominator sensationalism that deals almost exclusively with violence or hate or pain or anger or catastrophe or extremism, but the producers have the control over that stuff.

It’s been a good couple days.  My team completed the iteration in style, finishing all our commitments and making headway on some important analysis that put us in a good place during upcoming iterations.  I have a good team, and I am very lucky to work with them.

Gratitude is back on my mind again today – a random blog post elsewhere talked about it.  I ask myself am I expressing gratitude as much as I could? I don’t know, I guess that’s a never-ending question.  Plenty of people are deserving of my gratitude.  Thinking about it, I can think of times each day for the past few days where I’ve made special mention of someone who has done something nice or what have you.  Is it becoming second nature?  Would a friend describe me as someone who expresses well-deserved gratitude?  I hope so.

I’ve been doing some deep-dive exploration of PowerShell’s WMI provider and am thinking about adding yet more to my plate by doing a short series of blog posts for the smart-but-new-to-PowerShell developer about how to use WMI.  It’s powerful stuff.  And I’m guessing that those kind of posts will be hugely popular for the right search engine terms, because the current documentation is pretty thin.

Two people have told me that they felt “stalker-ish” by going to my blog to find out more about me.  I have to laugh – I put so much out there, that if I had any stalkers, they’d basically be able to find out anything they want, and know exactly where I go, almost all the time.  There is however, a part of me that occasionally wishes I could be even MORE open, MORE transparent, MORE clear – but there are some topics that are still taboo in this era where we expose almost everything.  Not to mention that if I write about it, it becomes more real, and sometimes I just want to forget, to move on, to seek out new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before…sorry, I digressed into a Star Trek moment there.  But writing-as-catharsis has a counterargument, writing-as-disguising-reality, and I don’t want to breathe life into something that’s bothering me by worrying it to death on these pages.  Maybe I’m bothered for no good reason, or I’m properly bothered and the appropriate response is just to ignore it and move on.  Blogging about it would just give it legs.

Which brings me to another recently reoccurring topic, Other People’s Comments.  I’m on much better terms today with a couple things that were said that hurt my feelings than I was, say, a week ago.  Stuff gets said.  Deal.  It helps when you realize that no malice was intended.

Big night of coding tomorrow night – wonder what coffee shop I’ll be at.  Probably Zoka, unless a better idea presents itself.  Then more work this weekend, intermixed with some time with the kids and (maybe) watching the Super Bowl.  Maybe I’ll look around for a Super Bowl party that a friend is already throwing and bring some chips and beer and Drew Brees jokes.

Wow, another novel!  Yay me. Thank you for reading.

So I agreed today to my first competitive multistage race, the RAGNAR – NWP, aka the Ragnar Relays at the Northwest Passage.  It’s a 187-mile race wherein 12 runners on each team race relay-style for the finish line.  From the Ragnar Relay website:

You and 11 of your closest friends running day and night, relay-style, through some of the most scenic terrain North America could muster. Add in live bands, inside jokes and a mild case of sleep deprivation. The result? Some call it a slumber party without sleep, pillows or deodorant. We call it a Ragnar Relay.

Sounds kind of fun, right?  I got word from an acquaintance on dailymile that they were looking for a couple more people to fill out their team, and hey, I’m game for anything.  Plus I love the challenge of a clear, motivating goal.

So, July 23rd and 24th, I’ll be running, resting, cheering, encouraging, and probably occasionally gasping for breath   Looking at last year’s results, the winning over 30 pace was 7-something per mile, which is way faster than I can run ONE leg, let alone three legs.  Wish me luck during my training the next six months – I need it!

No, seriously, though, what’s a Ragnar?  Turns out he was a 9th-century Norse king.  Their about page has a special section for people like me who get a kick out of the name and want to learn more.

I’m very excited.

I love this post by fellow Seattle 2.0 blogger Alyssa Royse about crushes.  Go read it.  Now. Sample passage:

It’s your power, and you shouldn’t give it away. Share it, absolutely. But you get to keep it, long after the rush of the crush subsides into the steady support of friendship, or even disappears to a memory of a romance long past. The lessons you learn about yourself – what makes you feel good, what you want, deserve, need and crave in life – are your lessons to keep and use as you create your own future. Crushes are what turn you on and give you the energy to create that future.

If you define “crush” broadly enough – and I think Alyssa does a pretty good job already of doing that – you can talk about crushing on anything.  New hobbies, new places, new people, new gadgets, new ways of thinking…it’s the essence of the crush, the thing that Alyssa captures so beautifully, that is important.  The thrill.  The excitement.  The engagement.  The occasional single-mindedness.  The obsession.  The notion that you have a secret, a happy secret, that you can share or not as you see fit.

From a personal/romantic point of view, we’ve all had crushes, and all been the subject of crushes.  Crushes subside, fade away, and pass into the realm of happy memory or sad recollection, depending, but I doubt any of you would deny that some of your most thrilling emotional/passionate moments have been experienced during those first few heady weeks of a crush.  Long after they’re gone you can still savor them – they’re yours to keep.

Crushing on anything or anyone in particular?  Go read Alyssa’s post and you’ll thank me later for pointing you there.

Just in case I come across as oh-so-fucking sanctimonious about how I’m nice and good and kind and all that similar horseshit, let me tell you a story about how it’s not all one-way and sometimes I need to look up at all of you from the depths to which I can sink.

Recently I heard about a favor that was sort of generally asked for, from nobody in particular, by one of my acquaintances.  It’s the kind of favor that if you’re someone I care about, I accommodate you in 2 seconds, no questions asked, and in fact I’m HAPPY to be able to do you the favor.  I like doing nice things for people I care about.

However, this particular person poses a real problem for me.  It stems from something they may or may not have done last year (!) that really, REALLY hurt my feelings.  I don’t even know if they actually did what I suspect/think/fear that they did, but – and this is ungracious, I’ll admit – they are the type of person that COULD have done this terrible thing that hurt me so badly.

The real shitty thing – as I sit here and judge myself – is that, even if said terrible thing actually happened, this person would really have no way of knowing, at the time or at any time since, that it would have hurt my feelings.  So I have sat and nursed my imaginary wounds, in the most self-pityingly passive-aggressive way possible, and this other person is Completely. Fucking. Oblivious. to the whole range of emotions going through my head.  Ever since, when I’ve run into this person, I’ve been pleasant and civil, but that’s about it.

So this favor that was recently asked?  Didn’t do it.  Didn’t offer myself up.  How terrible is that?  I mean, we all have the right to get angry, even about inconsequential things, but to hold onto that for months and months?  That’s the type of thing I need to free myself from.  Maybe I’ll do this person some other favor, or make some other nice gesture, to prove to myself that being kind and gracious carries no penalties, emotional or otherwise.  That’s what my mind tells me, and that’s what I believe – but sometimes, when somebody wounds you deeply, you trick yourself into all sorts of screwy defensive responses to try to protect what’s left; you barely know what’s real anymore.  Sometimes it can be taken to extremes, as when victims of domestic abuse defend their husbands, or kidnap victims start to identify with their captors (there’s a name for that syndrome which I can’t remember right now).

So who has wounded you?  How can you forgive him/her/them, even if you can’t directly acknowledge the original hurt?  Can you be bigger than the sum of what happens to you?  Can you move past the pain, the trauma, the raw emotional damage, and leave those burdens behind?  Can you stop defining your responses based on who or what has caused you to be hurt, and start defining yourself by what heals you and/or makes you happy?

Can I?

I have ten minutes but I’ve really been jonesing to write blog posts lately so I thought I’d crank out enough to scratch the itch while simultaneously serving up enough delightful information to keep you, my reader, coming back for more.

Random thought: does everyone have what it takes to be an analyst?  Technical, business, or otherwise?  I say no.  I say that analysis is a skill, a talent, just like ice skating or writing software or making cappuccinos, and not everyone has what it takes.  Can it be taught to anyone of quote-unquote reasonable intelligence?  Not sure.  I know, and have known, a couple great analysts, and I’ve also known some poor analysts.  My opinion is that the good analysts were smarter than the poor analysts, but I don’t know that there’s a strong correlation.  And in fact, I’ve known some brilliant programmers who were piss-poor analysts.  So I guess, in sum, within the confines of this poorly-researched and hastily-written blog post, I’d have to say that no, not everyone can become a good analyst.  Ergo, leave the analysis to the analysts.  In my humble opinion, of course.

As I wrote the word “humble” a hundred former coworkers gave an involuntary shudder, as if a ghost had crossed their path.

My stomach is feeling much better today.  Not perfect, but not enough to keep me from (a) going to the gym to lift weights and (b) playing in tonight’s company soccer match.  New location: Arena Sports Magnuson – we’re not in South Seattle tonight.  Maybe that means our luck will change and we’ll actually win one!  (one can hope).

What else?  Lots to say, not many ways to say it.  Therefore I’ll shut the hell up.  I’m doing relatively well at sticking to my resolutions, diet, exercise, and other, and have not much inclination to veer from the path, because it’s working OK for me.  And I’m still frustratingly coming to terms with how to deal with my slowness in getting past some recent comments that have wound their way around my ear canal like that super-bug from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Still working on it.  Exercise + Work + Busy = Distraction.

My ass is feeling better.  That’s always a plus.  The biking thing really didn’t effect me in terms of soreness nearly as much as I thought.  I might commute one day this week to start to get back into that particular rhythm.  I need to bring my laptop most mornings, so we’ll see how the practical logistics work out.

My personal organization scheme I dreamed up a couple weeks ago is still paying dividends.  Hat tip to @marinamartin for the inspiration.  Every time I have to put a goddamned red sticky on the sheet I shake a fist at myself.  Good immediate feedback.  Sort of like the mouse with the buzzer that gets the cheese, except in reverse.

Gotta run!  Hope you’re having a good day.